Allen Tate

’s Life And Career Essay, Research Paper David Havird TATE was born John Orley Allen Tate near Winchester, Kentucky, the son of John Orley Tate, a businessman, and Eleanor Parke Custis Varnell. During Tate’s

’s Life And Career Essay, Research Paper

David Havird

TATE was born John Orley Allen Tate near Winchester, Kentucky,

the son of John Orley Tate, a businessman, and Eleanor Parke Custis Varnell. During Tate’s

childhood the business interests of his father-lumber, land sales, and stocks-forced the

family to move as often as three times a year. As Tate later recalled, "we might as

well have been living, and I been born, in a tavern at a crossroads." By 1911 his

father’s business ventures and his parents’ marriage had failed. The youngest of three

boys by almost ten years, Tate found himself in "perpetual motion" with his

mother, a native Virginian whose family seat in Fairfax County later became the

"Pleasant Hill" of Tate’s only novel, The Fathers (1938).

From 1916 to 1917 Tate studied the violin at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. As

he implies in his late poem "The Buried Lake" (1953), his failure to fulfill his

musical ambitions signaled "the death of youth." In 1918 he enrolled at

Vanderbilt University in Nashville. During the fall semester of his senior year (1921), at

the invitation of Donald Davidson, a member of the English faculty, Tate began attending

the informal meetings of the group of men, which also included his sometime professor John

Crowe Ransom, that launched the Fugitive in 1922. Tate thus became a founding

editor of the poetry journal whose three-year run heralded the literary renascence of the

South.

At nineteen he had immersed himself in the English poet James Thomson’s The City of

Dreadful Night (1874), a seminal if (as he later confessed) "disconcerting"

influence on his verse. Now among the Fugitives, he distinguished himself as a savant of a

cosmopolitan body of literature. According to Ransom, Tate was already reading the French